A Different Mona Lisa

Botero's Mona Lisa

I came across this painting while visiting a good friend in Bogota. My friend was the one who first became fascinated with the artist's unique style upon seeing a painting from the Lonely Planet. We were lucky enough to come across a museum exhibiting the artist's most famous and beloved works while on a journey through Bogota's La Candelaria district. It was the Botero Museum. Entrance was free and taking photos were allowed. Aliw.

As you can observe from the painting above, Fernando Botero's subjects were painted or sculpted out of the normal proportion. The people or animals in his paintings or sculptures would be fat, bloated, inflated but beautiful, nonetheless. I really can't explain his work that well, so i had to search for websites that can say more than i can. Here's the best description i can find about Botero's art:

His work is characterized by inflated, rounded forms, painted with smooth, almost invisible brushstrokes, puffing up to an exaggerated size human figures, natural features, and objects of all kinds, celebrating the life within them while mocking their role in the world. Click here to read more.

I definitely agree with what the above statement says about the subjects celebrating life within them. You feel this in the colors of the paintings and the fluidity of the strokes or the form, if it were a sculpture. You would also see this in the faces of the people in the painting or their occupation -- they are either dancing, playing musical instruments, bathing, or sitting in a party, or under a tree as a family. You would get the idea that the people in the paintings actually live and not just exist.

Anyway, I hope you can look at his other works when you can. To me, Botero doesn't only paint a subject or a theme but he creates an entirely different world for everyone to experience and see. A wonderful world at that. His art tells me to embrace myself as I currently am, with all my shortcomings or bulges in all the wrong places. Actually, not just embrace but celebrate!